Systems Integrators Applaud New Groove Workspace 2.1 Release

Furthermore, integrators said the announcement by Groove of a Toolkit for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET will likely spark a wave of new Web services applications that can be integrated easily with Groove Workspace

Integrators said the new capabilities, and the pace of development by the Groove development team, led by Lotus Notes inventor and Groove Networks CEO Ray Ozzie, is impressive.

"This doubles the size of the potential target market for us," said John Parkinson, vice president and chief technologist for Cap Gemini Ernst and Young, referring to the announcement of Groove Workspace Version 2.1."E-mail integration is absolutely at the top of the list of successful deployment characteristics. The trick to making a collaborative tool work is [to integrate it into what a business already has."

Parkinson said that ultimately it will likely be the Visual Studio .Net toolkit that may have the biggest impact on increasing the sales of Groove Workspace in corporate accounts. Once developers start integrating new services with Groove, there will be an explosion of new uses for the collaborative software, he said.

"We have several major development efforts on the fast track now that we can develop better and quicker solutions using Microsoft Visual Studio .NET as the Groove development environment and deploy them with the Groove 2.1 workspace client," said John Olson, director of enterprise systems for BAE Systems, an integrator headquartered in McLean, Va.

Olson said the Lotus Notes integration, along with the enhanced messaging capabilities in Groove 2.1, will "speed sales and user adoption."

"For several key customers, Notes integration is key and something they've been waiting for," said Olson. "Account backup and restore is also important and something BAE Systems has been waiting for."

Olson said that each release of Groove has helped increase the acceptance of the product in the federal government sector that BAE focuses on. "We are optimistic that Groove 2.1 will further accelerate sales into our customer base," he said.

Symbiant Group, Inc., a software and IT services company, also announced the availability of a media review application for Groove. Symbiant's MediaTeam 1.1 is designed to make it easier to review training, marketing and digital media projects over the internet.

Dr. Rick Lillie, a certified public accountant and faculty member at California State University San Bernadino (Palm Desert Campus) and UCLA Extension faculty member, is using Groove and MediaTeam 1.1 to teach CPA classes.

Lillie says Groove and Groove tools like MediaTeam 1.1 are making it possible to effectively teach courses to students online and communicate with them either individually or as a group with audio, video and graphic content in shared or individual session workspaces.

Lillie said Groove is a lot more flexible and powerful than many of the high priced distance learning management systems that are being sold to universities. He said some initial research comparing Groove to a mainframe system found that Groove students felt they had "got far more of my time and personal attention over the Internet than they would have in a live class."